Romania’s tax authority starts offensive on tax dodgers, will check 5,400 high-risk individuals

Romania’s National Fiscal Administration Agency – ANAF has started a program to check wealthy individuals with a high fiscal risk. The agency will check some 5,400 individuals in program’s first phase, according to an official announcement. “The moment has come, after two years of careful preparations, to intensify our fight against tax evasion, including among individuals. Be they public personalities, manele singers or usurers, they are all just taxpayers for us and they will all have to prove they have paid their taxes on the revenues they used to build their fortunes,” said ANAF’s president Gelu Stefan Diaconu in a press release. The tax authority has divided the high fiscal risk individuals into four categories. The first category includes “rich owners of poor companies”. These are businessmen who own significant properties and have credited their companies, but have declared low taxable revenues in the past years. The investors who own companies that have recorded losses for years in a row despite having viable turnovers, will also be checked. The second high risk category includes people that own valuable properties but have no known economic activities. In this case, there’s a high probability that their revenues came from legal but undeclared activities, or from illegal activities such as usury, human trafficking, and others. The third high risk category includes people with volatile revenues. This includes artists who make money from participating in events without having permanent contracts to track their revenues. The famous gipsy manele singers in Romania will likely be targeted in this program. The fourth category includes other high-risk individuals who don’t fall into the previous three classifications. ANAF already allotted 60 fiscal inspectors who will work exclusively on this program. They have already been assigned 313 cases to work on. The fiscal authority applied several filters to determine the 5,400 high fiscal risk individuals out of a total of 14.4 million people who have taxable income in Romania. In the first filter, ANAF looked at all the people who made significant purchases in recent years. This includes associates or shareholders who have lent over EUR 45,000 (RON 200,000) to their companies, people who purchased houses or other goods worth over EUR 70,000, individuals with over EUR 34,000 (RON 150,000) in their bank accounts, and people who have bought cars priced over EUR 25,000. Almost 300,000 people qualified for the next stage, in which the tax authority compared the expenditures with the declared revenues for each of them. For more than 132,000 individuals the difference between the estimated expenses and the declared revenues was over 10% and over EUR 11,000 (RON 50,000). Then the ANAF applied another filter to determine the significant cases, including people who may have not declared revenues of over EUR 220,000 per year in the period 2011-2013. Almost 5,900 people were selected.